salt skin
by thecivilunrest
Summary: I'm winning wars they created just to understand the meaning of. /Or, Annie Cresta and coming home.


**Author: **thecivilunrest

**Fandom: **_The Hunger Games_

**Story Title: "**Salt Skin"

**Summary: ** I'm winning wars they created just to understand the meaning of. /Or, Annie Cresta and coming home.

**Character/Relationship(s): **Annie Cresta/Finnick Odair, Mags, Annie's mother

**Rating: **K+

**Warnings: **Hints of insanity, imagery.

**Story Word Count: **1500+

**Disclaimer: **I don't own anything.

**Notes: **Hahaha, I don't even know. This just kind of came out of me, and I actually sort of like it.

_Salt Skin_

This is what drowning feels like:

The water is everywhere, all consuming. It could eat you alive, its mouth wide and hungry, waiting for the moment that you stop moving and it can swallow you in one piece.

The waves lap at the shores of your body, forcing every crevice and pore open so that it can make its way inside of you. Your lungs get the worst of it, the pink flesh of them turning blue with pressure and suffocation.

You want to give up, give in, let the wet monster eat you up. The water has taken so many others, and when your head is under, the sunlight giving you a sickly lifeline that passes right through your fingers, you can hear their voices.

_Don't give up_, they scream. They didn't follow their own advice; if they had they wouldn't be swirling around you, all eyes and slimy fingers. _Don't give up. _

You can't tread this water, you just can't. You can see air above your head, and the sky mocks you. The sky can do nothing while you are underneath its twin sister, so it just watches you drown.

And then.

And then and then and then your head breaks free. You have beat the monster, you won.

Or at least that's what the booming voice, the sound of which breaks the bones in your ears, tells you.

You've won.

.x.

When Annie Cresta gets off the train, her feet curling in the sand of District Four, nothing looks the way that it had when she left.

But nothing really looks the same now. Sometimes she sees what she's supposed to; people look like people, she looks like herself, and the things around her look how she remembers they did. Sometimes, though, sometimes things are clouded, like dirty water.

They become clouded, and things distort. People aren't people; they're a school of fish, seaweed stuck on a rock and flowing with the currents, animals with sharp teeth that can rip flesh right off the bone and leave nothing but a bloody trail behind.

"Oh, _Annie_," her mother sighs, and wraps her up in arms that are warm and smell of fish and roe and salt. Annie doesn't like people touching her, not anymore. She had screamed and screamed and screamed when the people in the Capitol had poked and prodded at her, trying to mold her into the person that she was before.

Annie lets her mother hold her, because her mother is warm and forgiving and the water clears up ever so slightly when she's around something familiar. Her mother is nothing like water, not cold and unrelenting and full of a cold, dark laughter that floats up from its depths.

.x.

Mags comes and visits her sometimes, and Annie likes that. Mags had helped save her, in the Games. Sometimes, when the water is clear and she can see things how they are supposed to be seen, Annie wonders if she should hate her for that.

But she can't. Mags is too familiar, the lines in her face could hold water, but don't, and that's the best part.

"I'm sorry," Mags whispers one day, when she thinks that Annie can't hear her, when Annie is too busy trying not to drown. But that's the thing about water: sound is magnified, distorted into something that it isn't. That's why Annie has to cover her ears, sometimes, so that sound doesn't engulf her. "I didn't think you were going to win."

Annie didn't think she was going to win either. Back when she cared about those sort of things, before the water invaded all of her senses, she hadn't been very highly favored. She hadn't been a Career, hadn't wanted to go to the Games and kill people, and her muscles were soft because of that.

There were few things that she had wanted, a house, Finnick Odair, food to eat and clothes to wear, but being a Victor hadn't been one of them.

She one was now, so she just had to keep swimming.

.x.

This is what Finnick Odair meant to her, once:

Finnick Odair had been laughter echoing off cave walls, had been the sun reflecting off of sea spray and creating rainbows. Finnick Odair had been soft kisses on her lips, gentle fingers in her hair, and if she hadn't seen it herself she never would have believed that he had killed people by running his trident through them.

Their time together was sometimes brief and sometimes long; it depended on whether or not the Capitol wanted Finnick. Most of the time they wanted Finnick, and so he went to them, but he always came back to Annie. That had been when she had been happiest.

This is what Finnick Odair meant to her now:

He shone too brightly, and looking at him made her eyes hurt. Mags told her that this is what happened sometimes to sailors on their boats, that the shine from off the water made their eyes squint and their sight dimmed.

Annie didn't want her sight to dim, so she stayed away from Finnick Odair. Besides sometimes now, when he came home from the Capitol and knocked on the door of her brand new house on Victor's Island, he reminded her of a monster with teeth too sharp and claws that gutted out their prey with a single swoop. His trident was no longer an extension of him; he was an extension of his trident.

He reminded her of the dark parts of the water, the parts that sunlight broke against. That was where the people of the Capitol came from, and Annie knew that they captured Finnick and pulled him there. And that was the scariest part of all.

.x.

She used to love the ocean. She loved how it broke against the cliff, unrelenting even though the rocks would never waver. They would just stand there, take the beating, but the sea would always continue to try. She had admired that.

In District Four there are stories of gods that controlled everything, even the ocean, but Annie knows better now. The Games had taught her that. The only gods were the sky and the sea themselves, nothing controlling them. They took what they wanted, when they wanted it, and nothing could save them.

The sky could touch nothing, so it turned cold and unforgiving, protecting its own heart by making it a fiery ball of heat and pain that turned people pink and dried out everything that it could. The sea, in turn, turned black and ugly and cold when it realized that it could never touch its brother again.

Sometimes they fought, because that was the only time that they could brush against each other, and no one really won, despite the destruction they laid to everything around them.

It was during one such storm that Finnick finds her, sitting with her chin on her knees and hair dripping wet. "Annie," he shouts over the storm, "we need to go!"

Annie doesn't want to leave, not really, but he grabs her hand and pulls her so that she has no choice to follow. The spray coming from the sky is too thick to get anywhere so he leads her into a black and empty cave.

"I like you better like this," she tells him after their chests aren't heaving anymore. Outside the water howls and the sky growls back. She can taste both of their displeasure on her tongue, even if she can't feel it on her skin. "You're yourself again." And he is. His smile no longer could puncture people's skin, he doesn't try so hard to be funny, and sometimes his eyes glint like spray in the sun again.

"I'm always myself," he says, and there's hurt thick in his voice. Annie hasn't been speaking to him much, because she doesn't like him when he's not himself, and he doesn't remind her of one of the souls in the deep.

"No you're not," she answers simply. "You're never yourself when they take you into the dark depths with them. It's only when you come up to breathe that you're yourself again."

For a moment, the sky and the sea both still, and a calm smothers everything like a blanket. Annie knows that they'll start again soon, though. Things like this can't last.

.x.

This is life above water:

Annie can see through the water better now. It doesn't cloud her vision as badly as it once did. Occasionally she has to cover her ears, because the distorted sounds haunt her in her dreams, but it's better than it was before.

Finnick still goes to the dark depths, and every time he does it seems to take him longer and longer to bring his head up, but he does every time. For her.

Annie grows to love the ocean again, but she will never forget the god that almost swallowed her whole, nor will she forget the brother that lets starfish dry out in the wake of his heart.


End file.
